Lecturer in Theoretical Nuclear Physics, University of Surrey

Hi world, Arnau Rios speaking!

I am a theoretical physicist working at the
University of Surrey. Surf the upper panel
to find information about who I am and the
research I carry on. Students or post-docs interested in carrying out a research
project on theoretical nuclear physics and
looking for funding opportunities,
contact me!

Matthew Barton becomes a doctor
07/02/2018

Matthew Barton has successfully held his PhD thesis
viva today. His work on time-dependent Hartree-Fock
techniques has been published in a paper here
and a preprint here.
His thesis dealt with a more complex beyond-mean-field theory, time-dependent density
matrix, and was a feat in temps of both physics
output and computational developments.

Congratulations Matthew!

Outreach on neutron star binaries
21/11/2017

On Tuesday November 21 from 6:30 pm, I will be
participating in an outreach event on the
Gravitational Wave discovery GW170817 as announced
here.
LIGO's latest gravitational wave detection has
spawned an explosion of new science across the global astronomical community.
I plan to focus on how this tells us
about neutron stars and the creation of the
elements. My colleague Rob Izzard from the
astrophysics group will discuss how these events
come into being in binary stellar systems.

Farewell to NewCompStar
08/11/2017

Today I bid farewell to the
NewCompStar COST
action. It has been a very interesting 4 years, with
several meetings, conferences, workshops and summer
schools. To me, the real value of this action has
been the interdisciplinary components:meeting with
colleagues of the astrohysics community
to discuss and progress our understanding on neutron
stars. The farewell coincides with the discovery of
the binary GW170817 in gravitational waves and
across the electromagnetic spectrum, which opens a new
window into neutron stars... I have tried to
summarise the progress on equation of state in the
NewCompStar era in the review talk
here in a
nice meeting in Catania.

Crust-core transition and Gogny forces
12/06/2017

Neutron stars are like chocolat fondants:
solid in the outside and liquid in the inside.
The neutron liquid sea turns into a solid crystaline
lattice of nuclei at the so-called crust-core
transition point. The density at which this
transition occurs is correlated to
experimental properties of nuclei. In this paper
with the nuclear physics group in
Barcelona, we explore the range of crust-core
transitions predicted by Gogny nuclear
interactions and look an neutron-star properties as
well (like the mass-radius relation in the picture
on the left). More details
here.

Nuclear spectral functions and chiral forces
10/02/2017

Spectral functions characterise the properties of
nucleons in dense matter. They provide a
unique insight into nuclear correlations and can be
used to access both thermodynamical and structural properties. We have
found a way to characterise spectral functions and
provide a link to chiral nuclear hamiltonians by looking
at the size and shape of the spectral function's
standard deviations. All explained in more detail in
here!

Outreach
03/08/2016

Here's the talk that I gave at the
TEDx
Event "Redifining the Ordinary" on 27
February 2016. I hope you enjoy it!

Di-neutrons? Yes, please
16/02/2016

Di-neutrons are loosely bound states of two
neutrons. They do not exist in free-space, but they
can appear in dense nuclear media. In a
preprint in
collaboration with Felipe Isaule (who visited Surrey
for a month on Jan 2015) and Prof.
Hugo Arellano, we
report on the first microscopic results on the
structure of di-neutrons in neutron matter.

Fission paper out
01/02/2016

My second paper on nuclear fission,
with results from Phil Goddard's thesis and in
collaboration with Paul Stevenson,
has now been published here. Have a look to see what you can do with
3D TDHF and boosts!

Rosh Sellahewa becomes a doctor
12/11/2015

Roshan Sellahewa,
(co-supervised with Jim Al-Khalili) has
successfully held his thesis viva today. His work on
neutron star physics and the Gogny interaction has
been published here. And there are
more papers to come, even though Rosh has moved on
to pastures new. Congratulations Rosh!

Fission week!
28/10/2015

This website has been on a standstill during my
paternity leave on the summer of 2015 - but I am
back to work!
I have decided to dub this week "Fission week":
my first paper on fission has been accepted for
publication in Phys. Rev. C, and the second one is
out now as a preprint. All
these results were cooked up by Phil Goddard, a
former PhD student that now does more useful stuff!

Pairing gap and correlations
23/02/2015

The pairing gap in high-density neutron matter is
sensite to short- and long-range
correlations. Some new results on these effects are
presented in a preprint, written with collaborators at
Washington University in St. Louis.

Why is lead so kinky?
10/10/2012

IoP One-Day Meeting
21/03/2013

Arnau is organizing a
meeting
on "Correlations in exotic nuclear systems" at the
Cockroft Institute, Daresbury Laboratory. This will be a
meeting point for experimentalists and theorists
interested in the evolution of correlations with
isospin asymmetry, including everything from shell
changes to symmetry energy studies.
Contact me if you are interested in participating!

IoP SOUTH CENTRAL BRANCH LECTURE
13/03/2013

Arnau gave an outreach IoP Lecture on
neutron
stars
at the University of Surrey. Thanks to all of those
who attended it!
Link to the talk:
pdf

More news

30 July 2012: Arnau's first
paper
with the
Catania
group has been submitted!